This invention relates to marketing and distribution, but more specifically, to a method and apparatus to enable a producer, supplier, promoter, and/or individual to promote, sell, and/or distribute a product or service over the Internet or other network.
In the past, certain products and services such as an entry ticket for an entertainment event have been sold through intermediary distributors having an established relationship with the producer or promoter. An event ticket for an entertainment or musical performance is used as an example in this disclosure. The cost of such tickets include intermediary or middleman service fees which are often shared with the producer, promoter, venue owner, and/or patrons. These service fees may add a significant cost to the ticket price and, in many instances, they exceed half of the ticket's price.
Increased costs cause many attendees to forego purchasing a ticket for an event that they otherwise would attend. Further, service fees diminish promoter profits, which profits might otherwise be used to book other events or for service improvements. Such middleman service fees may also injure venue owners because higher fees reduce ticket sales and reduce income. In addition, because online piracy of event productions, such as music recordings, is so prevalent, many performers have come to depend solely on live performances for their income. Higher patronage at shows increases revenue for these artists, which positively impacts their ability to continue performing. Therefore, reduction of middleman service fees would increase ticket sales, lower costs to the fans, and increase profits for promoters, venue owners, and the musical performers.
Prior attempts to use the Internet to promote, sell, and distribute tickets for musical performances provided only a limited success. Typically, a fan may purchase tickets to the event through a middleman's website, but each fan must separately access a particular website in order to purchase, reserve, and/or print an entry ticket. It would be beneficial to provide a system and method to increase the number of sites for ticket purchasing and distribution in order to increase ticket sales.
In the past, music event promoters have used email, mass messaging, and social networking sites to economically and quickly promote events and reach many individuals, but such techniques have had limited success due to a lack of credibility associated with the message originator. Accordingly, response rates for these types of promotion and distribution methods tend to produce a low number of actual ticket sales. In today's information-laden culture, individuals are bombarded with messages and very often ignore information from untrusted or unknown sources. Further, there is no assurance that the individual promoting the event has actually purchased a ticket or attended the associated event. Therefore, it would be beneficial to develop a system or method that provides a trusted source to promote and distribute credentials or tickets for musical and other events where the message originator is known or has purchased a ticket to the event. This would resolve the credibility problem and improve the chance that event information reaches a broader audience.
Music fans, for example, have less incentive to promote a musical event because there is no reward for doing so and present-day incentive methods are not well-suited for mass ticket sales or distribution. In other industries, tiered or multi-level marketing and distribution programs have been used to generate incentives to sell and recruit others to sell and distribute. But there are special challenges in the music industry that so far have made these methods impractical. Namely, musical events are time-sensitive events. Any multi-level promotion and ticket distribution program must be reset frequently, which currently is not done. In fact, most multi-level marketing programs are built and depend on a stable, non-changing structure. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a multilevel marketing and distribution method and system for ticket sales that would reset and propagate itself quickly.
Although a musical event was used as an example, one of skill in the art will appreciate that many of these solutions disclosed herein apply to other time sensitive events whose ticket sales and distribution may be enhanced through a credible promotion source and through providing multiple sales and distribution channels. For example, the airline industry, hotel industry, exhibition industry, sporting industry, theater industry, or an enthusiast gathering (e.g., 1970s muscle car club), and the like, are all examples of industries whose product has a temporal limit.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide an Internet-based, multi-level marketing and distribution system and method that provide quick reset capabilities for new events. It would further be beneficial for such system and method to provide trusted information and to increase the number of points of sales/distribution for tickets. The present invention accomplishes these among other things in order to solve the above-mentioned problems.